A Love Story from the Korean War: “Tent of the Dead”

This true story is told as I experienced it when only a boy. The names and place are changed out of respect for the privacy of those who lived it.

                                                

     When I was a boy, terrible sicknesses came to children. Sarah had scarlet fever when she was fifteen. Her mother said Sarah’s heart might fail if she exerted herself. So, she mainly played the piano and read. But on those summer days too hot or rainy to play outdoors, I played canasta with Sarah and her mother in their little house. In our town of Vashti, we lived next door in the old Burgess house, upstairs. This was before mothers did public work and Sarah’s mother was always home as was mine.

     Even before she was sick, Sarah had a boyfriend who went to Korea. Jeff was shy and he and Sarah would sit on the screened porch in the wooden swing. Few people had air conditioning and the porch was the place to sit on hot summer days. But then, there was a war to save Korea from communism, though we were all young and only knew that it was a war in a faraway place, a war now forgotten for the most part. But thousands of American boys were killed or hurt in the fighting.  Jeff was shot while fighting near a place called Inchon. The ambulance that took him to the field hospital was fired on by an enemy fighter plane. The driver was killed, and the ambulance careened off the road and crashed. Jeff’s head was crushed.

     I learned all this by listening to Sarah’s mother talking on the telephone to my mother. At the field hospital, Jeff was laid aside in a tent with others who were believed to be beyond help. But a doctor went for a smoke and, standing in the tent of the dead, heard Jeff breathe. The doctor took him into the operating tent and saved Jeff’s life. He screwed a silver plate over the hole in Jeff’s skull where the shattered bone had been.

     When Jeff came home, he was different. He would walk to Sarah’s home and sit on the porch with Sarah. They would swing in the white metal swing, but he never talked. Sarah’s mother told me Jeff was not the same since he came home. Both Sarah and Jeff were broken, so most days they sat in the swing in silence.

     I still played games of cards with Sarah and her mother, until one day Jeff came as usual, only he stayed across the road by the mailbox and Sarah waited on the porch in the swing. After what seemed an hour, Jeff walked back home  and never came again.

     Sarah’s mother said it was too sad and we should not play games there anymore. When I asked why Jeff stopped coming and why Sarah did not want to play games anymore, my mother wept and could not talk.

-Joe Kitchens